Live to ride: Top Northwest jockey Booger found calling early on

AUBURN — He never could stay away. Not from the moment he saw those images flickering across the television screen — the ones of men on horseback, racing — and knew he had to ride. Sometimes, there's no explaining such impulses.

They spring from the soul unannounced, capturing the heart and mind. That's the way it was for Gallyn Mitchell, though he says now he couldn't have been more than 4 or 5 years old at the time.

"It just looked like something I wanted to do," he says. "Something with a thrill, you know?"

His life is one of a passion fulfilled, a tale of how a tiny kid from a small town in Southern California forged a career out of a calling and became one of the more successful jockeys in the Pacific Northwest. It is a story glossed with a Hollywood sheen — his talents have led to stunt work in several motion pictures, including the upcoming film, "Seabiscuit" — but dressed very much in blue-collar fashion.

Take, for instance, his name. Gallyn. Nobody calls him that, least of all his family and friends. To them, he's just Booger.

"That little booger is into everything," his mother, Sandy Mitchell, used to say.

And over the years the nickname stuck.

Somehow it still seems fitting on this recent morning at the Quarter Chute Cafe, where Booger Mitchell has just excused himself from a card game to take a seat at a window table.

He is something of a legend at Emerald Downs, having won more races (659), stakes races (37) and money ($5.9 million) than any jockey in track history. Before riding here, he was a fixture at Longacres.

He has been asked to reminisce, and the journey back in time has begun, in part, with a lament.

"Back when I was learning in the '70s, it was not quite like it is today," he says. "You worked from the ground up. You're grooming, and then you're galloping, and ... after you rode a horse, you'd hurry up, shower, get back and go out and cool that horse out. ... It was a little tougher riding than it is now."

More than two decades have passed since Mitchell first arrived in the Northwest, another fresh face eager to prove his place. He rode hard from the start. And he was aggressive, sometimes overly so.

"When he first came around, he was like every other young guy," said retired jockey Bryson Cooper, 52, now an exercise rider for trainer Jim Penney. "He was trying awful hard."

Cooper remembers a race at Yakima Meadows where Mitchell protected a lead by swerving briefly in front of his path as he tried to close from the rail. The move caused Cooper to check slightly, and ultimately, it decided the race.

Mitchell finished first, Cooper somewhere else.

In some ways, however, Mitchell hasn't changed from his earliest years on the family ranch in Bloomington, Calif. His parents owned a rodeo company there, and Mitchell grew up riding all kinds of livestock. Steers. Bulls. Bucking horses. It didn't matter. If it had four legs, he rode it. And if he could, he raced it.

Once, he even raced a kid on horseback right down the middle of a paved road.

"All he wanted to do from the time he was little was race," said Mitchell's younger brother, Darwin, a livestock coordinator on movie sets. "He got more whuppins for match-racing my dad's horses."

By the time Mitchell reached high school, racing had become a near obsession.

The family lived within an hour's drive from three different tracks, and he almost always could be found at one of them, galloping horses or helping out on the backside.

His mother went out of her way to help, driving Booger, then in his early teens, to Santa Anita or Hollywood Park after working the night shift.

Nature, too, seemed to lend a hand, as he stopped growing at 5 feet while all three of his brothers sprouted at least 6 inches more.

Meanwhile, school was becoming less and less of a priority. During Mitchell's junior year at Bloomington High, he dropped out and took to the road with a hard-living bronc rider named Jerry Smith.

"He was just taking up somebody else's seat that wanted to learn," his mother says. "All he wanted to do was ride horses."

For most of the next two years, he traveled with Smith, from California to Kentucky to Florida, then back again, learning the sport from the ground up.

"He pretty much taught me the basics," Mitchell says of Smith. "I was pretty much a natural on a horse anyway."

Some say it is that background that makes Mitchell the rider he is today. By most accounts, he's terrific in the gate, possessing a special ability to calm a horse and get it to break swiftly and cleanly.

His 81 wins aboard 2-year-olds — from the track's first year in 1996 through last season — are the most of any jockey at Emerald Downs and a testament to his horsemanship.

"He's very versatile in his riding and very good on young horses," Penney said. "And he's a rider that will listen to you about the horse."

Mitchell returned from his travels with Smith as passionate as ever.

On Jan. 29, 1981, on a sloppy track at Santa Anita in Arcadia, Calif., he made his first trip to the winner's circle, aboard a 27-to-1 shot named My Dutchess.

"I didn't know a whole lot. Matter of fact, I didn't have mud clothes and it was pouring down rain," Mitchell says. "But it didn't matter to me. It was a special day."

He arrived at Longacres later that year and went to work building his career in the Pacific Northwest.

Plenty has changed over the years.

Mitchell draws fewer longshots than before. He is less apt to take foolish chances.

Mitchell is healthier, too, having fought and won a battle against a drug-and-alcohol addiction that plagued him during the early part of his career. He is coming up soon on 13 years sober.

But much remains the same. He still rides hard, the same way he did as a kid growing up in Bloomington. And he still desperately wants to win.

"I've always rode everything 100 percent," he says. "The only way I can't win a race is if I'm sitting in the jocks' room. I've always felt that way."

Booger Mitchell will be 41 next month.

He is married, a father of three and a veteran of more than two decades in the saddle. But he has no intentions of slowing down.

Given continued good health, he might have another 10 or 15 years left.

"I'm going to keep going until my body can't go no more," he says. "Hopefully, that's still a long time."

Matt Peterson: 206-515-5536 or mpeterson@seattletimes.com